U of C scientists develop font that helps simplify the complex

Thandi Fletcher, Calgary Herald06.18.2012

University of Calgary computer science professor Sheelagh Carpendale and PhD candidate Uta Hinrichs have develop FatFonts, which represent the numeric value of digits by giving them more visual weight as the value increases.Courtesy Riley Brandt, University of Calgary
/ Handout

University of Calgary computer science professor Sheelagh Carpendale and PhD candidate Uta Hinrichs have develop FatFonts, which represent the numeric value of digits by giving them more visual weight as the value increases.Courtesy Riley Brandt, University of Calgary
/ Handout

University of Calgary computer science professor Sheelagh Carpendale has develop FatFonts, a new font that visual represents the size of a digit by making bigger values bigger in size.Courtesy Riley Brandt, University of Calgary
/ Handout

CALGARY — If 534 is 178 times bigger than the number three, what does that really look like?

A team of University of Calgary computer scientists has developed a font that presents the complex concept in a simple way: Digits grow fatter as they get higher in value.

Called FatFonts, the new typeface is unique from regular typefaces in that the amount of ink used for each number is proportional to its value.

“With regular fonts, you can’t use them to provide the data intensity overview because a nine will show up about as dark as the one or the two,” explained computer science professor Sheelagh Carpendale. “So we changed the fonts so that it would actually be able to do that.”

Here's an example.

With FatFonts, the number 1 would appear very skinny with an almost transparent quality, while an eight is significantly darker and more plump with eight times the amount of ink. As the numbers get higher, the amount of ink, or pixels, they are made up of remain proportional to their value.

“So if you have a certain number of ink in the number 1, you will want eight times that amount of ink in the number eight,” Carpendale said.

For larger numbers, the second or third digits become “nested,” or stacked, within one another. However, this poses a limitation where the nested number becomes so small that it is no longer readable, Carpendale said.

“At this point, largely due to screen resolution, we are limited to three-nested digits,” she said.

Developed by Carpendale, along with PhD candidate Uta Hinrichs and University of St. Andrews computer scientist Miguel Nacenta, FatFonts puts an ingenious spin on paint-by-numbers.

The font can literally paint an image with digits representing data values. For example, the numbers can be used to represent elevation on a topographical map, where lighter areas illustrate areas with a lower elevation and darker areas show mountains and peaks with a higher elevation.

Although it has taken two years to develop FatFonts, it is only now garnering international attention, Carpendale said.

The new font was featured in a recent issue of the science news weekly, New Scientist, and on the website for popular tech magazine, Wired.

“We had a bit of a difficult time publishing it in the science world, maybe because the idea is pushing a lot of boundaries in science and typography,” Carpendale said.

Hinrichs said the invention has the potential to transform the field of data visualization, adding a new tool to the belts of scientists, graphic designers and even artists.

“One artist contacted us and wanted to create jewelry with the font,” she said. “Because it has this visually interesting quality, there is a broad range of things that you can do with it.”

Scientists can use the font for scientific data, and graphic designers have shown interest in using it for infographics in print media, Hinrichs said.

Infographics, which have risen dramatically in popularity in recent years through blogs and social media websites, present information or data in a visually appealing and often eye-opening way.

With Carpendale, Hinrichs created their own infographic of the devastating tsunami that hit the coast of Japan in March 2011, using FatFonts to visually represent data on wave size predictions.

“Normally, this kind of data is represented using colour scales,” Hinrichs said. “The advantage of FatFonts is that they can represent overall trends in the data, areas of high and low wave amplitude, but also reveal the exact value of each point.”

Although the font was a hit at a recent conference in Capri, Italy, it’s getting mixed reviews from type designers.

“They’re either very enthusiastic or they hate us,” Carpendale said with a laugh.

Type designers pride themselves on the consistency between different letters or numbers in a font style, she said.

But with FatFonts, the rules of traditional font design are broken. Although the font grows consistently from one number to the next, “there’s quite a difference from one number to the next,” Carpendale said.

While there have been some criticisms, University of British Columbia computer scientist Tamara Munzner said she was impressed by FatFonts’ “broad range of applicability” from print to high-resolution screens, like those found on iPads and other tablets.

It’s “one of the first information visualization methods that has been explicitly designed to take full advantage of the latest high-resolution display technology,” said Munzner, who has researched information visualization techniques.

FatFonts is open source and is free for anyone to download and put their own spin on, Hinrichs said. Already, an Oxford scholar has contributed to FatFonts with his own version of it, she said.

“We want people to just run with the idea and come up with their own interesting creations and use them,” she said.

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